Strategic Intelligence: Telecom Services Sector Scorecard Q1 2025 Update

Strategic Intelligence: Telecom Services Sector Scorecard Q1 2025 Update

Summary

SK Telecom retains its position on the top of the thematic rankings for GlobalData’s telecom services sector scorecard. Its scores of 5 out of 5 for the 5G and digitalization themes, which suggests that the company’s activity in these themes will significantly improve its future performance, keep it ahead of European giants Telefónica, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom, each of which score 4 out of 5 for these two themes.

Telecom carriers continue to roll out mobile and fiber infrastructure to support their ever-widening range of services, leading to supply-side consolidation and changing investment and ownership structures. At the same time, carriers seek value-added services to expand their margins and target efficiency by digitizing, virtualizing, and cloudifying their networks and associated services and applications. They increasingly exploit artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize performance, propositions, and customer service.

These operational challenges are surrounded by a wide range of external factors, from regulatory constraints and interference, data sovereignty compliance, evolving global supply chains and restrictions, constant cybersecurity threats, investor demands for better returns, the impact of AI, ongoing commitments to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets, and demanding customers.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the telecom services sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• GlobalData’s thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition, and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• At GlobalData, we have developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• Our thematic engine tags over 180 million data items across six alternative data sets—patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news—to themes. The vast datasets within our thematic engine help our analysts to produce sector scorecards that identify the companies best placed to succeed in a future filled with multiple disruptive threats.